


The Simple Art of Skip-Tracing

by Za_Alek



Category: None - Fandom
Genre: F/M, Space Opera, Tolkien is mentioned, books are sexy, why not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-02
Updated: 2018-11-02
Packaged: 2019-08-16 17:46:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16499894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Za_Alek/pseuds/Za_Alek
Summary: Violet Stockton is on a station in the back of beyond. She gets by chasing down skipped cargo and crews. It's routine, boring work, but it pays the bills and keeps her in a beverage Bob down in the cantina *swears* is coffee.Then Beren Moss walks in with a curious case of missing...well...cases, and things get a little hotter than Vi is used to.Personally *and* professionally, if you know what we mean.





	1. Chapter 1

When he walked in, I didn't realize he'd change everything, but he did.

I wasn't expecting him to walk into my one-woman detective agency, tucked away here in the corner of this dinky space station. We'd been in the center of it all once, but those days were long gone, and this was like renting a room in a hotel in a ghost town.

The rent was cheap, though, and the connecting shuttle flights were reasonable with pilots who didn't ask too many questions. He looked...competent, and since he looked like he could take care of himself, I wasn't sure why he was here. Well, that wasn't the first thing I thought when he walked in, not when he was wearing those pants. Tight and tucked into tall scuffed brown leather boots, those pants were the first thing I thought about when I met him. No, that's not quite right either. I thought about what his butt would look like in those pants. It didn't disappoint.

What the books you read as a kid never tell you is that space can make you weirdly soft. Most space installations have some gravity, but it burns a lot of fuel to rotate a craft enough to generate something close to Earth-norm, and if you aren’t on a swanky ship or station, you lose muscle tone unless you work at it. He obviously did.

Oh, not enough to be obnoxious. He wasn’t going to start telling me about his Crossfit box on a neighboring station, or how the supplements his mechanic’s girlfriend sold worked miracles, but it was plain that he put some effort into his physique. Hence… that butt.

I’m not exactly Miss Galaxy, but I do have enough manners not to openly ogle, and I carefully contained my ogling as he turned back toward my desk after checking the corridor outside and closing the door. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t somewhat distracted thinking about his butt out of those pants. I needed to get laid. There was simply no way around it. I needed to pay my bills more, though, so I dragged my mind out of the gutter and focused on his face.

Well, shit.

That wasn’t much better.

I’m not saying he was ugly. Nope, far from it. He was cute, actually. Really cute, with a flop of bright copper hair standing up in some spiky hat hair, greenish hazel eyes, and freckles that marched across the bridge of his nose, across his jaw, and wandered down to the open neck of his shirt. The scowl didn't do a lot for him, though.

He sat down in the chair across from my desk and laid a battered black hat on the blotter, brim up, red and white acorns on the hat band ticking softly off the surface. Tucked up into the inside band, I could see a little flexible data screen, one used by soccer moms to show off their rugrats. It showed a woman in red, holding a baby swaddled in blue. Seemed like a weird family portrait, but hey, it was upside down and not my business.

“Hi. Make yourself at home. Can I get you a cup of something that might look like coffee in dim light and with a good squint?” I said.

I really needed a chance to look at something else for a second. I needed to get my libido under control and my brain back to work mode. This was the first person to walk through my door in a week, and it might mean the difference between eating actual meat or trying to make a protein pack edible. That never worked, by the way.

I didn’t wait for his answer. I spun around in my chair, stood up and moved to the corner of my closet-sized space. I push a button on the wall, then rolled my eyes and thumped a panel with my closed fist. With a squeak, the bev dispenser rotated down and out. I popped the top of the filter chamber, wrinkling my nose at the sight of damp grounds. I thumped the filter against the trash chute, then refilled with some of the brown stuff the little cantina passed off as coffee.

Grabbing the only clean mug, well, the only mug at all, I pushed the button for coffee. The icon of the little steaming cup had long since worn away, but I could do this in my sleep. I probably had, come to think of it. I tended to pull some long nights in pursuit of credits.

I turned back and shoved the coffee across to him. A little bit of the liquid sloshed over the side, and he caught the drop before it was halfway down the side of the mug. He absentmindedly licked it off his finger and grimaced slightly at the taste. “I’ve got some creamer and sweetener here, if you think that’ll help,” I offered, waving at the drawer under the dispenser. I knew it wouldn’t, but it seemed polite. He looked at the mug doubtfully, then shook his head.

He took a sip, very carefully not pulling a scrunched-up face at the taste, and then set the mug down. “I’m not sure what would help this, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be vacuum-stable creamer. Thanks, though,” he said.

“So, what can I do for you?” I asked as the silence stretched out between us. Evidently, he didn’t feel the need for small talk. I did feel the need for some cash, so I jumped in. “I specialize in finding skipped cargo, skipped people, and returning stowaways to their point of departure.”

“I’ve got a little bit of both skips to run down,” he said, then jumped like a scalded cat at a clanking noise outside the door.

“Relax, it’s just one of the automated bots hitting a kneeknocker,” I explained. “They sometimes glitch and forget to jump the bulkhead thresholds. It happens a couple times a week. I’ll send a note to Maynard down in the refurb shop and he’ll fix it. Until next time, anyway.”

This station was old enough to be made of steel and ceramic alloys, and back when the Illustria was built, space stations looked more like space-born old Earth Navy ships. The bigger ones were the size of aircraft carriers, and one of the oldest stations still in existence was named the Ranger, evidently in honor of a blue water Navy ship. I didn’t care, but my dad had been an Earth WW IV buff and could name all the ships sunk in the Pacific theater. I personally thought Ranger sounded like the name of a dog but what did I know?

I dragged my attention back to the present. “So, let me guess. The cargo skipped town about the same time as some crew, and you need them back. Bonded for delivery?” He sighed and looked hurt. “Yeah, on both counts,” he said. “The weird thing is that the skipped crew isn’t anyone new. He’s been on my crew for years, and we’ve hauled more valuable stuff than this. I’m not sure what the hell went wrong this time.”

“That happens. It sucks, but it happens,” I said.

It was a story I’d heard more than once. It usually meant the thief had lucked into a buyer for that specific cargo, making it inherently more valuable than past cargoes. So, they skipped out and everyone lived miserably ever after.


	2. Getting Down to Business. Also, sharks.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where we learn more about space, stations, Beren, and Vi.

“Maybe we should actually introduce ourselves? It’s nice to know that you’re the right person for the job, but I can’t very well transfer credits to ‘I specialize, etcetera’,” he said. “I’m Beren. Captain Beren Moss, of the _Gwen._ ”

I looked at him.

“Beren? Tha-“

He interrupted me.

“My parents were Tolkien fans, okay? Don’t start. I’ve heard every joke you can think of and a few you probably haven’t.”

“Oh. Well, okay then. Are there a lot of Tolkien jokes? I don’t think I’ve heard any,” I said slowly, thinking. I hadn’t read a lot of Tolkien. I was more a trashy romance reader, with some old Tom Clancy books thrown in for fun. Don't judge me.

“Are you kidding? Elves, dwarves, goblins, orcs, and whatever else people want to drag up to appear funny,” Beren said drily. “It’s not actually funny. I think I’ve finally gotten away from most of them, though. Spacers don’t seem to be the Old Earth fantasy type.”

“Right. No jokes about elves. I’m Violet. You can call me Vi, if you like. Depends on how much of a hurry you’re in,” I said. “And you are sitting in the palatial offices of V. Stockton Investigations, Inc.”

His gaze flicked across the desk, bounced off the far wall, then came back to rest on my face. “Very nice,” he said, without a trace of irony.

Living on a spaceship will do that to you. If I’d had any good coffee, I would have bet my last cup that Beren was former military, so this might be nice. From what I understood from some of the old soldiers in the station’s bar, living aboard a ship was a bit dodgy if you were claustrophobic. The fact that I could stretch out full length and then stand up and stretch might seem roomy indeed. I preferred to not sleep in the same size container they’d used to shoot my body out into space, so I tended to make my home on a station. It’s not like my living quarters were much bigger than my office, but I didn’t have to hot bunk with anyone else.

“Great, so that’s out of the way. If I decide to take your job, I’ll give you the routing number for the credits. Half up front, half when the job’s finished. Expenses are calculated on the week, with standard per-diem rates,” I said. Most of the time folks pushed back against the per-diem thing, but if you don’t ask, you don’t get. “After I review the details, I’ll estimate how long I think it’ll take, and provide a breakdown on billables. Then, we get started on the actual investigation.”

“That’s fine,” Beren said. “The cargo was on a pretty tight timeline, though, so do you have an idea of when you’ll get all that information to me? Ideally, I’d like to get moving on this today.”

Today was a little…flexible on station time. I glanced at the clock embedded in the bulkhead. It wasn’t even noon.

“It’s entirely possible to get started today,” I said. “You have time to answer some questions? That’ll make calculating the hours a little easier.”

“Of course. It’s not like I can really do much else until I get the cargo back, you know?” He shrugged, then pulled out a coin, turning it over in his hands.

I pulled out my tablet, opened a word processing program, and started typing. I tended to talk to myself as I typed, but he sat through the basic file set up without mentioning it. I tabbed over to a spreadsheet, one that had a lot of previous jobs indexed through it. If I could generally match up the type of job and cargo, it made estimating the number of hours easier. I suck at math.

“Here we go with the specifics. What was the cargo?” I asked, not looking up.

“Six temperature controlled crates,” he answered. “Anti-grav lockers, basically, with genetic locks.”

“Okay, so now I know what kind of boxes they stole. What’s inside the boxes? That’s going to help me determine where it’ll get fenced. Diamonds go through difference channels than opiumites, and they go through different channels than bootlegged porn.”

He went very still. So, did I.

“I can’t tell you,” he finally said.

“Then I’m going to ask you to pay for an hour of my time as a consultant’s fee and tell you I’m very sorry you’ve wasted your time,” I said.

“What? You’ve changed your mind?” he asked, incredulous.

“No, I haven’t changed my mind, but I’m not psychic. You want me to help trace the cargo, I need to know what it is to find out where it might end up. Out here on the ass end of space, it’s actually a lot harder to move stolen cargo than you’d think. The pilots here aren’t blabby, but they’re also not looking to get burned by moving hot merchandise. We’re small enough that one problem tends to end up being a pain for more than that single pilot, and if I ask around, I might be able to figure out who took it to which transshipping point.”

“Can you do that with just the locker description? If you can’t, I’ll give you more information, but right now, I’m trying to stick to the terms of my contract,” he said. He sounded genuinely upset. “I’m not trying to be dishonest. I swear.”

“Yeah, I might be able to. Let me get Patches to check the logs, find out who took off this morning, and then we can check destinations. Anything specialized is going to need a larger transfer station that most of the regular pit stops, and it’s probably going to have to be someplace where the law is a little bit more bribable. Or lazy. Whatever.”

“It’s at least going to be somewhere they can jump out of pretty quickly. A rigorous inspection schedule isn’t your skip’s friend,” I said. “That means any of the resort worlds or stations is out, especially anything owned by Disney. They want their dock fees and they want to be able to make sure you’re not smuggling in anything they can upcharge for.”

Yes, Disney was still around. Never a company to miss out on earning a dollar, they’d privately funded oodles of space technology research, and it had paid out in spades. They’d patented more gadgets and systems than I had fingers and toes, and even if a lot of it had come into the public domain, they’d owned the plans long enough to have made a tidy sum. Tesla was the same way, along with Space X, and the Electric Dragon partnership had earned the investors billions.

At this point, Disney owned several resort worlds, a few luxury space stations, and a fleet of cruise ships, all gleaming visions that would have made Gene Roddenberry proud. For most of us, we saw those ships in glossy brochures in port side travel offices. If you wanted a luxury ship, you paid for it, and it was cheaper, albeit dirtier and a lot more cramped, to stick with tried and true designs. Those were the ones that included exposed tubing, bulkheads with knee-knockers, and grease stains.

“So, that leaves me with a few places to start,” I said. “Give me half an hour and I’ll have an invoice and contract for you to sign. There’s another cup of coffee left in the carafe, if you’re feeling brave.”

Beren nodded politely, but he hadn’t finished the first cup and I didn’t figure he’d take me up on that. I reached out and snagged the mug.

“Hey!”

“What? Like you’re going to drink it?” I asked, taking a quick swig of the lukewarm liquid. “Ugh. One of these days, we’re going to catch Bob doctoring the ground coffee on his shelves with engine scrapings, and mutiny.”

I set the mug back down in front of him and went back to my tablet. I could hear the coin moving through Beren’s hands, clicking against a ring probably. A few minutes later, I turned the tablet toward him.

“There. That seem fair?” I pointed to the top of the screen. “If I’ve referenced the job right, this is a pretty standard, if a bit mysterious, skip. Shouldn’t take more than 40 hours. Per diem is on that line.”

“You make an hourly rate like that and you rent rooms here?” He looked dubious.

“Yes,” I answered flatly. “You’re welcome to take your case elsewhere, although I’m the only one on the Illustria who’s got the skills you need.”

“Oh, what skills are those?” He sounded a little sarcastic.

“I know everyone on this bucket. They all know me. If I ask questions, they know I won’t turn around and sell them out, or try to shark their cargo to a higher bidder,” I said, tiredly. “They know I wouldn’t be asking without a good reason, and that if I ask, the cargo is probably a legit skip, rather than a pirate looking for a small fish to beat up on. However, if you think you can get folks to talk to you, feel free to ask around. I’ll be here when you’re done.”

“Shark their cargo? A small fish to beat up on? That’s a lot of fish in one sentence, although most people think sharks are mammals. They’re not though, more like eels.” he said, distracted with his eyes still on the tablet. “Does this have an NDA attached to it?”

“Yes. All my contracts do. People wouldn’t trust me to find out sensitive information if they thought I was going to sell it to the tabloids. Why the hell do you know so much about sharks? And fish?”

“A passenger left a book on sharks in the Imbroglio’s library. I got stuck there when the Gwen needed some rewiring. It was interesting. One of the only non-fiction books in there,” he said, then picked up the stylus and signed with a scrawl. He was left-handed, his hand hooking around the stylus a bit. Using a pencil and paper must have been a bitch. He’d have ended up with lead all over his hand.

“All right. You go back to your ship, I’ll ask a few questions, and we’ll get moving,” I said. “There’s a pretty good chance I’ll at least get some information from Bill, and we can meet in the bar around dinner time. Then, we plan.”

“What am I supposed to do until then?” he asked, sounding a bit put out.

“Go read on your ship? Look at the library here, see if we’ve got anything you want to trade for. You could go talk to Bob at the cantina, see if he’s got any supplies you need, but don’t let him talk you into any weird whiskey. He distills that shit down in the engineering compartment, and it’ll probably make you go blind or something. In any case, you can’t stay here.”

I shooed him out of the closet-sized office, slapped the palm lock, and headed down the corridor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Adding more to it. Evidently, I've decided that my universe has limited data transfer from ship to ship and ship to station, so libraries are a thing. Who knew?


	3. In Space, No One Cares About the Dewey Decimal System

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Moving forward. Well, into the library, at least.

My first stop was not the station master’s office.

“Hey, Patches, you in here?” I asked, poking my head into a cluttered room near the sunward end of the station.

Sunward was kind of funny, since we weren’t close enough to a star to actually point to it, but cylindrical stations had sunward and darkside. No close stars made getting out and away from the station easier, though, not being close to anything with a gravity well stronger than a kitten. I don’t pretend to understand how the physics of space travel work, so I won’t bore you with long descriptions from hyperspace mechanical theory textbooks.

“Yo, Violet! What brings you down here? Watch that cable, there, it’s connected to…” he rolled out of one of the narrow passages between racks of servers and computer processers, and waved his hand at a rack of black boxes, all of them lit up like Christmas trees with various lights. The wheels on his chair squeaked. “The power’s fritzing out and the vacuum exchange rate is…never mind. You’re not that interested,” Patches Foster said. Patches was a medium-sized guy with nondescript brown hair, and brilliant blue eyes. Those eyes were always a little bit shocking, but they crinkled up at the corner as he smiled.

“Can you put your station master hat on? I need to look at the departure logs for the last few days, if you don’t mind,” I said cheerfully. “I’ve got a job.”

“Sure, give me a sec. I need to button up a servo station back there and then I’ll be right out. You know where the logs are kept, so I’ll meet you there,” he said, gesturing back toward the racks he’d emerged from.

I went back through the airtight door, briefly inspecting the silicone rubber gaskets out of habit. When you depended on the bulkhead doors being airtight in case of hull breach, those gaskets were literally the difference between life and death, especially here. The server room was close to the outer hull, to facilitate vacuum cooling of the most critical computers. Every station inhabitant, at least those of us who lived here long term, did the quick visual checks out of unthinking habit. Hadn’t needed the doors yet, but tomorrow was another day.

The station master's office was just down the corridor from the server room, which meant the station master needed to be as much a computer geek as a paper pusher. Patches preferred being up to his coverall zippers in cables and wiring and brightly colored computer guts, but he had an iron grip on his paperwork, too, and the station's arrival and departure logs were neat and perfectly maintained.

I punched up the last couple days logs on the public terminal, mentally ticking off flights in my head. No, that was old Bumper, heading out on his usual mail run, nothing weird there. I’ve seen that ship’s name before, he’s been here a few times, usually running cargo for Bob in the cantina, although he’s a new supply guy… No, not that one. Or that one. Then, something caught my eye.

“Huh, that’s kind of weird,” I muttered, pulling up the registry paperwork for the space equivalent of a cigarette boat. “Zippers” were light ships, mostly used as diplomatic couriers, and were either stripped to the hull to move even faster, or tricked out to make trips the ultimate in decadent speed. They were fast, damn near undetectable when moving at speed, and expensive as hell. We didn’t see a lot of them out here in the space boonies.

“What’s is?” Patches asked as he walked up, wiping his hands with a rag. I pointed and he nodded. “Yeah, that was kinda weird. We don’t see a lot of Mako-class zippers out here. She put in with some sort of on board emergency, early morning, two days ago, then cleared out in the middle of the night. Didn’t even request a refund for the rest of her docking fees. She was paid up for 48 hours, and then poof.”

“Huh. I don’t suppose she filed a flight plan, did she?” I wasn’t terribly hopeful, but a few captains did, since if they didn’t make their next destination, someone could possibly do some sleuthing and figure out where the last port call had been. Oh, sure, you could bounce all over the place getting from point A to point B, but time in vacuum meant fuel, and that meant money right out the airlock, so there were generally accepted routes.

“Nah, she wasn’t here long enough for that,” Patches said, scratching his cheek. He clicked a few keys, and frowned. “Her registry was out of the Comorra sector. I’ve heard rumors of some shady stuff happening there but I didn’t have any reason to check deeper. You might hit up Yani, she’s likely have more information on ships in that area. I think she used to run a med supply route to some of the out-rim planets in that sector. It’s been a while though.”

“Thanks, Patches. I’ll do that,” I said, then blew him a kiss before I turned to head to the library. It was a good bet that if Yani was on station, she would be there.

The library was closer to the inner core of the station than the hull, although with as narrow a spindle as the Illustria, that wasn’t saying all that much. It was a converted cabin, with battered furniture, and beat up bookshelves, stuffed with all manner of books, magazines, and newspapers. Beren was sitting on a hard chair, his foot tucked up under him, leafing through a book of Earth maps.

He looked up as I stepped through the door, and I held up my hand to ward off any excitement. “Hang on, I’m not here to talk to you. You see the librarian around? A tall lady, looks like your grandma? Well, looks like anyone’s grandma, really.”

“This station ranks a _librarian?_ How does that happen?” Beren looked around doubtfully. “I mean, for a dot on a chart, you’ve got a good library, but librarians are usually hard to come by.”

“I’m not sure how Yani ended up being the librarian. She’s been here as long as I can remember,” I said, looking around for Yani’s spare figure and long gray braid. “I think she was part of the original crew, like someone’s kid, or something, and she just stayed after she quit making runs to some of the outer sectors. I have no idea how it all works with food and air fees and stuff, but she’s got a good idea of where all the books are and sometimes, she just knows shit. I mean, like, it’s weird the stuff she just pulls out of thin air.”

“Oh, okay,” he shrugged and went back to the color map plates. “This is an unusual book. Is this normal for this station?”

“The map book? I have no idea. That book’s been here since way before I showed up. I think some spacer with dreams of blue water ships left it here after space crushed his dreams, or something,” I said absently, squinting down at it. “We have a few of those kind of books. Yani calls them the reference section, and they’re the only ones not for trade.”

He nodded and got back to his study of the intricate maps. I didn’t really blame him. That kind of mapmaking was an art. Star charts and astrogation maps didn’t ever get that kind of loving attention, unless you were willing to pay out the wazoo. Even then, it would be a digital work, and not ink and paint on paper. That made sense, since digital files took up a lot less space on a ship, but they lacked a certain something that made the old plates so captivating.

Yani stepped through the bulkhead door, carrying a steam cup in one hand and thick paperback in the other. The steam smelled like real coffee and I started drooling slightly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Um, so I don't really have any notes, yet.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a work in progress, in my own world, with my own characters. Thanks to all the friends who've encouraged me to keep tinking away at this thing.


End file.
